The Imagery Conundrum

A couple of nights ago, I introduced the prolific poet and editor Michael Meyerhofer at his Respite by the River poetry reading. His reading was terrific, and so is his work. It was hot that evening,

and we were outside on the lawn of the River Center house, warm breezes blowing, acorn woodpeckers' cackling commentary int he background. The hardy audience (because we in Fresno don't wimp out when it's hot) was highly, intensely engaged, and a lively Q and A followed.

In the introduction I related something Michael had told me when I interviewed him--about imagery in poems. He said, "Everything is a fractal for something else." This felt true to me--a modern quantum-physics version of T.S. Eliot's notion of the "objective correlative", one of the bases of modern poetry, the gist of which is that a particular emotion is evoked by means of symbols that objectify the emotion and are associated with it. That the image does the emotional work of the poem. The image is the object (vivid, clear) that connects with feeling. The strong feelings Meyerhofer's poems evoked from his audience were deeply connected to his imagery.

But what an image, exactly? It's a word or phrase, and concrete. A characteristic of Fresno poetry is that images are grounded in the natural world. An image is sensual--experienced through one or more of our five senses (taste, touch, hearing, sight, smell). It shows, rather than tells. It may be literal, like "the gnarled branch" or figurative "bent like a gnarled branch"--using simile, metaphor, personification, and other devices. It is at once accurate, and it reminds the reader of memories and associations. Images do the work of the poem, much like related photographs, intentionally stacked, tell a story.

Sometimes a poem begin with an image that sticks in a poet's mind. My poem, "Speaking of Words" (published in my chapbook Vanishing Point, 2018, The Orchard Street Press) began with an image that haunted me. See my next blog for the story, and that poem.